Life

Of all the world’s inhabitants I’ve fallen in love with recently, I fell hardest for the song sparrow. Its melody relieved the early days of Covid, and it kept singing until the dry days of August parched its tiny voice. It built a nest in the giant heap of cut-down branches. Quite the fortress, you’d…

I was at the dump today. With seagulls and eagles (and maybe a bear). Cans and bottles and scrubbed out jars. Boxes, more boxes and (oops!) legal files. Dead TVs in a metallic morgue, awaiting postmortem by hammer and torch. Chicken bones and Barbies with hair all tangled. Melon rind, headlamp from a 1990s Ford.…

Dead daisies are beautiful and I don’t care. Look at them, with their crusty petals and hollow seeds. So brown and so defiant. But they’re dead! they say. They’re deceased, they’re passed, and they’re done. A dead daisy is over and I have no use for such a thing. But look! I say back. Those…

I fell in love with my saucepan this morning. We’re not getting married or anything. But I noticed a deep affection – a warm swelling in my chest. It was early, you see. Time to put the cooled pot of curry in the fridge. The pan was so heavy and so stained; hard and metally…

Love says ‘I am everything.’

Wisdom says ‘I am nothing.’

Between the two, my life flows

One of the (shush!) side benefits of the whole Covid thing was that my 2020 sales goals went for crap. In January, we’d set targets that were higher than last year. But when March came along, we were like, “we’ll do what we can.” And as the spring dragged on, I started thinking, why the…

The birds here are singing just as loudly although it’s raining. Yet we as humans tend to think of the rain as “bad”. Interesting.

More=Better=Addiction (h/t @lynne_twist)

Driving down the highway, going somewhere different, I noticed the trees, like a wall. Sometimes, I would steal a look to the right and see what was through the forest, but I never could. Then at 1pm, I needed to pee, so I pulled over and stomped into the undergrowth, to a secret, hidden world.…

The other week, my nephew found a flower, shyly living in the jungly green. “Look at its colours,” he said. “The purple that fades to pink. It’s so amazing.” I asked him if he knew what it was called – but he wasn’t interested. So I told him anyway. “It’s a twinflower,” I said. “I…

Childhood holidays were a five-hour hot slog up the motorway – with a stop for tuna sandwiches on the way – to camp in a field in Yorkshire or Cumbria or Dorset. They were the best vacations a child could ask for. But without fail on arrival, I would have a tantrum: An unquenchable meltdown…

When I was a child, I would lie in the bathtub so my feet could turn on the taps. Then I would block one of the spouts with my big toe. Sometimes, I would dip my head under the water and hear the phlock as my ears filled and my senses deadened. I squeaked my…

I thought I was going to die as I drove into the moose; that moment as control is compressed into brakes and steering-wheel knuckles when there’s nothing to do except stamp down and wait. When we stopped, I got out of the car. I was cheerfully alive and I didn’t look back at the moose…

In February, which seems three decades ago not three months, I was in Lisbon. The Portuguese capital, famous for salted cod and custard tarts, is also known for its hills. The steepest and tallest of these sit facing each other, the flat plain of the commercial district in the middle. The Barrio Alto, the wealthy…

I was a teenager in the 1980s. The era of big hair. I was no exception. I let my locks storm upwards and outwards, a hormone-powered thicket of bouncy wire. At the age of 17, I wrote an article for a computer magazine called 8000 Plus. They published my picture next to it. I was…

The night train from Madrid to Murcia had the type of carriages where passengers sit in compartments: a row of 3 facing a row of 3, for eight upright hours through darkness. At the age of 20, I decided to study for a year in Spain. I didn’t speak Spanish. I’d never travelled abroad alone.…

The autumn term (as they called the first semester of the school year back in England) started bronzed and enthusiastic in September, and ended tinseled and over-excited at Christmas, passing through conkers (put them in vinegar and they get hard), bonfire night (sparklers and disappointing back garden displays), before sliding into evenings that closed in…

One day I thought I saw a falling satellite but it was probably just a seagull. When I was very little, legend has it I looked up at the sky and informed my mother there were stars but no moon, so she should buy one in the shops. My brother (because he was younger and…

About 45 minutes from where I grew up, in sniffing distance of the River Alde, is the Snape Maltings concert hall. Inside the varnished room are taught strings and shiny brass, outside a reedy forest, oozy mud and ducks. Concert-goers in jackets and dresses sip interval wine with herons and frogs. It’s known for its…

When I was about three, I was terrified of collapsing sandcastles. It was the kind of terror that infiltrates every cell. It was visceral and it was total. Even now, I remember my utter revulsion when I saw the structure crack. I don’t know if it was the destruction or the denaturing that bothered me…

A friend once told me that the way to walk busy city streets was to fix your gaze ahead, focused on exactly where you wanted to go. With such an eagle-stare, sidewalk pedestrians would part to create a path. I tried it and it works. You just have to imagine you’re the only one there…

At the age of 11, I started high school, two bus rides away into another world. I was a fish scooped from his cozy bowl, poured into the ocean with its sharks and eels, currents and waves. None of this was friendly. I was Nemo lost. Each day, I was trapped there from 8 until…

When I was eight years old, I went on a school trip to the British county of Derbyshire. Our youth hostel was in spitting distance of the village of Eyam, which in 1665 quarantined itself to stop the Bubonic plague spreading elsewhere. But let’s gloss over that for now. It was one of my first…

At the age of 16, I was sent to see a career counselor. She made me fill in a form and then the computer spat out a list of suitable careers on a dot-matrix printer with the holey edges you had to tear off. I was to be an accountant or a librarian. There wasn’t…

My last silent meditation retreat lasted seven days. There were clouds of mosquitoes and deer flies that bite your head. The food was good. Life gets small on a retreat. There’s no phones and no internet. There are no outsiders. There’s no news. No movies. Even books are discouraged. Instead there is meditation and breakfast…

Yesterday I sold a newspaper ad to a woman who makes soap. Today I unsold her. I have this new job – publisher of a local community newspaper. We’re one of the few still doing OK right now. It’s a good newspaper in a tight-knit community. But it’s still hard to sell ads – the…

One of the most dangerous things about driving in a Canadian winter isn’t the black ice (although that is dangerous) or the freezing rain (although that is dangerous too), it’s running out of windshield wiper fluid. In the right conditions, the salt that gets sprayed on the road becomes a mist, which crusts the glass…

I’d been married only two years – and then I was in a room with the dead uncle. Well, the uncle-in-law. It was the first time I’d seen a dead person. In my community back in England, the dead are hidden, put in a box and then slid away behind a curtain. They are barely…

The best night of the year was when Father Christmas came to my street. Never has a truck looked so magical, transformed by lights and music into CHRISTMAS – and all the excitement that meant to a little boy in his pajamas. I’d watch from the living room window and then open the front door…

Mr Redgrave was the headmaster of my first school. His face was crumpled, he smoked cigars, and his office had a scratchy carpet the colour of a kingfisher. A visit to this room and its fuggy air usually meant only one thing: you were in trouble. That was not a place I wanted to be.…

I never knew if I was being hazed or if this was how it was. At the end of the 90s, I did editing shifts on a big Sunday newspaper. I was a hamster in a cage 22 floors up London’s Canary Wharf tower, waiting for a pellet to drop down a chute. The pellet…

When the newspaper came out last week, I realized we’d left my name off an article. All those wonderful words written by Anon. This year, through a series of (un)fortunate circumstances, I find myself back in the newspaper world. These days I’m writing and editing and checking and selling … and melting ice outside the…

One day when I was about seven years old, our next-door neighbour put a boat on his front lawn. There it sat, marooned with – most critically – its propeller-end sticking out into our driveway. What was it doing there? I have no idea – except it caused much discussion around our kitchen table. (Mind…

I fear I was my violin teacher’s worst nightmare: a scratchy, screechy, stinky teenager who never picked up his instrument between Tuesdays. “Did you practice this week?” she would ask. “Yes,” I would say. But we both knew the truth. It’s not that I didn’t like the violin. Indeed, I was something of a classical…

One Christmas, when I was six years old, I had a massive – existential – argument with my parents. I was sobbing on a stool in the kitchen while the turkey was roasting and the Brussels sprouts boiling. I was tear-shooting upset at the injustice and indignity of a fight I deserved to win. From…

I first heard of Margaret Thatcher when I was in the Downing Primary School playground and someone referred to her as an “old bag.” I didn’t know who she was, but I worked out that it wasn’t good to be an “old bag,” which was worse than being a “new bag,” but probably not as…

When I was six, I wanted to be an elevator operator. There was excitement in buttons, sending cabled box to basement and roof. (I graduated to escalators, hitting the emergency stop in Debenhams, pushing shoppers into a Christmas Eve avalanche.) My teen years coincided with the “loadsamoney” 80s, when loud boys in wide jackets got…

“Look at that bird, he’s so sweet.” I remember my dad saying that, pointing at a close-up he’d taken of a bird in our back garden. The photo was so sharp you could see the fluffiness of its feathers and the shininess of its eye. Dad was a keen photographer while I was growing up.…

Last Tuesday, Dave (not his real name, let’s protect the guilty here) assured me he was happy in his job. Two days later, he quit. And that caused a problem, because the business I co-own had no one to run it. It also caused considerable anger: he had committed to stay until the end of…

About 30 minutes from my childhood home was the Minsmere bird reserve – a marshy oasis of salty brackish water on the eroding Suffolk coast. I went there on a school trip and we were shepherded into one of the hides – those crouching sheds that get close up to the birds. Inside it was…

I remember joking to my brother once that the only reason the two of us got out of Ipswich was because we used an orbit of neighbouring Bury St Edmunds as a slingshot, like the Voyager space probe, to give us enough momentum to escape the gravity of our hometown. Ipswich, we had come to…